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<title>Meteor on Windows</title> </head> <body>

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Wondered what your comment was about until I saw your username. Although I'm not one to really demand sites provide support for browsers without JS enabled it does seem a bit silly that the site requires JS to just display what is basically a static page.
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For those curious, the FAQ says that this should be addressed in the future (it presently sends HTML to search engines if the spiderable package is installed.)

>A future version of Meteor will also send HTML to web browsers on inital page load. The Meteor templating system was designed specifically to support this use case.

I wonder why they have not implemented that from the beginning. Right now rendering the initial page with JavaScript feels non-native, like a Flash plug-in. I suspect that it will be even more noticeable for large web applications.
Though I understand the point you are trying to make, and agree with it as well, lets please not have novelty accounts here.
Protip - if you turn javascript on you can read the article.
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I know what you are trying to say, but I'd argue that the time has gone and past on HTML-only. JavaScript is a required part of the internet presentation platform at this point.
Required for this page, yes.

But, necessary? Only for interactive visualizations and content updates.

It's gone far beyond that for many sites. It's essentially a minimum requirement now, and there's not much good reason for it not to be enabled.
I would prefer my mobile devices not have to burn the extra battery required to execute JavaScript code just to display a page of purely static content.

Yes, it is reasonable to expect all browsers to have JavaScript enabled, but that doesn't mean it should be carelessly used.

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But there IS good reason for disabling things like js. Disabling makes sense for both security and privacy reasons, and yes, costs. The most publicized example of the latter is cheaper airline tickets.
With certain frameworks and languages, I have just decided to bite the bullet and use Linux to avoid running into bugs that the minority have.

Logically, if few people have a bug, it won't get as much resources to get fixed. It's like developing a Rails application on Windows, I can do it sure; but _should_ I?

Linux Mint is a great alternative to the clusterfuck that Ubuntu has become and it's been a simple transition from Windows 7. Multiple monitor support is intuitive as well. No configuration needed.

Vagrant is also an awesome alternative to a VM or full installation of any Linux flavor. I've been playing with it and together with the subset of Linux commands that comes with MSysGit I can even SSH into the Vagrant box from the regular Windows command prompt or Console2.
The new http://win.meteor.com also documents two Vagrant-based solutions for those that feel the same way, and should kick-start someone unfamiliar with Vagrant / Shell / Chef / Linux. I maintain the Chef version posted here...

Edit: And it should be highlighted that these Vagrant solutions offer a work around for the Meteor MongoDB to be able to utilize the Vagrant Synced folders, so the editing and viewing is near-native using your standard Windows tools. The live updating in Meteor also works, and the Vagrant versions also support Meteorite.

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Huge fan of vagrant, but found it really annoying for node projects. It seems virtualbox vm's don't work well when mixing shared folders and symlinks (used for local npm installs). Has anyone found a workout for this?
In Gabriel's guide (http://goo.gl/clpKa) on this page, he found a workaround that is implemented in both Vagrant solutions featured here.

Essentially the directory for things like the NPM modules and the MongoDB database files would be a mount --bind symlink. This in concert with the Vagrant / VirtualBox flag:

  config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
    v.customize ["setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/vagrant-root", "1"]
  end
My Meteor Chef recipe automates the binding of these using the Chef "mount" resource and is around line 89 of the chef recipe: https://github.com/shoebappa/vagrant-meteor-windows/blob/mas...

I don't think either of us could get this to work when putting this in fstab because Vagrant also has things in fstab and so the VM wouldn't boot, but in my case Chef handles the creation of these on boot, and in Gabriel's he recommends putting the command in the mount --bing in the .bashrc

This is exactly what I've done. I started a nodejs project and opted for Mint for my first actual linux experience. No real complaints after a year.
what a waste of talent, i pity any company using windows as a server...